


The five certainties experienced by the Hargreaves siblings while time traveling

by orphan_account



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Family, End of the World, Gen, Post-Canon, Post-Season/Series 01, Siblings, Stream of Consciousness, Tags Are Hard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-25
Updated: 2019-08-25
Packaged: 2020-09-26 10:20:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20388130
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: 'The world ends and it's your fault.'In which time travel (without a brief case) makes the boundaries between bodies and consciousness a little blurred.





	The five certainties experienced by the Hargreaves siblings while time traveling

**Author's Note:**

> Guess who's jet lagged, posting this, then instantly orphaning it !? 
> 
> (You can't, it's anonymous).
> 
> Enjoy kids.

The world ends and it’s your fault and the weight of that presses heavy on your shoulders.

Which are… far larger than you remember, fucking huge even, your shoulders that is. They shouldn’t be this big. You’re muscled, but not that large.

Wait, you don’t have muscles at all, you’re scrawny.

You’re prepubescent. 

You’re incorporeal. 

You're … fuck, you’re everyone.

Luther and Diego and Allison and Klaus and Five and Ben and Vanya.

or maybe more accurately

lutheranddiegoandallisonandklausandfiveandbenandvanya

Or even 

onetwothreefourfivesixseven.

Numbers in sequence rather than individuals and suddenly the math is fucked up.

You’re thirteen and thirty and fifty-eight all at once.

Dead and alive and spinning out before the world blows up around you.

Because the world has ended. And that shouldn’t be something that’s hard to forget, considering that it happened milliseconds ago. But also you’re now seven in one when you haven’t been seven for the longest of times. And can you really be seven if one of you is dead? But you feel like seven (the collective number, not the person).

And that is Five’s fault.

(the person, not the number)

Which is the second certainty you have right now: the world has ended and it’s Five fault that right now you’re more than just you.

It’s probably got something to do with temporal shifts, and subatomic particles and the particulars of time travel (without a briefcase).

Five understands this, and Luther knows something about it because of his time on the moon (and that hurts, knowing that you were there for four years for no reason other than that Dad didn’t know what else to do with you) but the others don’t, and don’t care. Or didn’t care. Until suddenly they – you – are caught up in a whirring mess of bodies and emotions and whatever the fuck this is.

The end of the world, that’s what it is.

Certainty number three: everyone is dead.

Claire is dead.

That thought makes you want to scream. Yell that you couldn't stop it. Blow up the fucking world again for being so fucking unfair that she died and you weren’t there and you didn’t die when she did.

Everyone you love is dead. Though ‘everyone you love’ is not a huge amount of people, you can count those people on one hand (which inexplicably has more than five fingers right now).

Apart from Claire everyone went before (Mom and Dad and Pogo and Eudora and Dave and Leonard)   
  
_ Leonard? Fucking Leonard?  _

Fucking Leonard who you loved for less than a week and then shot through with knives and watched as he twitched and died. 

(Great, Vanya’s able to chip in, even though she’s currently unconscious and not having to deal with the realities of flying through time and space, really fucking helpful Vanya)

Everybody has to go at some point, why not now, all together.

Even you’ll die one day.

You’ve already died, over a decade ago.

Or earlier this week, when your head cracked against a dance floor.

But then you came back.

Will you come back from this?

Or will you be spinning around forever, as everyone all at once?

(at least you’re not alone anymore)

It’s a good time for introspection, this spinning mess of siblings (and ghosts and lovers and enemies).

This week has been a mess. But no more of a mess than the weeks that came before it. A more cohesive mess even. You’re all together. Five’s back. Ben’s back. Well, Ben’s been here the whole time but only Klaus knew, and Klaus decided not to share because he’s a selfish bastard like that. Because he knew you wouldn’t believe him if he did. Because he was too drug addled to say. And Because no one has spoken to each other since Ben left (died, he didn’t leave, he died and it was horrible) but now you’re together and when you stop being lutheranddiegoandallisonandklausandfiveandbenandvanya you’ll be Luther and Diego and Allison and Klaus and Five and Ben and Vanya again.

Maybe.

But first you have to live through this. 

Which seems like it won't be easy because right now your head, heads, collective brain, feels like it might explore because there's just so much going on in it. Because Vanya blew up the moon and the shockwave killed all life on earth.

(And did she blow up the moon because Luther wouldn't shut the fuck up about it ? It would be pretty funny if he had. Well not funny, because that's the third thing in Vanya's list of: attack Allison, kill Pogo, blow up the moon and the other two were pretty personal and hard hitting)

And Vanya's emotions are whirring around in that big collective brain of yours and it's mostly anger and sorrow and Leonard.

_ Again! Fucking Leonard. _

So maybe it's good she's been knocked the fuck out because that shit is intense.

You try to give names (numbers) to feelings and drag snippits of thoughts and form them into sentences that are somewhat understandable. 

And Luther's holding his sister in his arms and wondering how he failed so badly at being number one and he's holding Allison's hand like it's the last life line he'll ever have and she's thinking of Claire, and how shallow her life was, and the hand in hers and Diego is mourning Mom, and how he failed her twice, how he watched her die twice and how apart from Eudora the best relationship he had was with metal and electrical wires and that ended badly just the same and Five is keeping you on track steering this ship of limbs and repression while Klaus is singing in his head, eyes squeezed shut because there are people dying all around them and he has enough PTSD as it is thank you and Ben…

You focus on Ben

All of you at once

Because you think Ben is also focusing on you

And he's been here THE WHOLE TIME

Or at least all the times Klaus was around

And no one bothered to focus on Klaus long enough to see anything else but the fuck up in front of them. 

(It's not a Klaus-exclusive issue, you're shit at caring about the ones who aren't you, but now you're all you and it's hard not to care with everyone's issues banging about in your brain)

He feels happy, for a dead guy, a dead kid

There's waves of 'I missed you. I love you' coming off him.

Caressing you like tentacles.

(_'cant you guys come up with a more originally simile?'_

_'no, because dad skipped the standard curriculum in favour of _self defense for toddlers')

It's hard to believe anyone would love you, let alone miss you. 

Any of you. 

All of you.

Certainty number four: death puts things into perspective.

Ben's death tore you apart (though you'd been stretching at the seams for a long time) and now, in a fucked up way, the death of all life on earth is bringing up back together. 

And Ben's here, again, here, like he always has been and he loves you.

And you love you. 

And all the other yous who are you right now. 

Maybe you're not thirteen and thirty and fifty-eight and dead. 

Maybe you're a child again (children) maybe you're a team, or even younger than that, before you could curve knives or spread rumors, before you even knew what dead people where let alone how to talk to them, when all you really remember is six other bodies near yours, heartbeats in the night and the reminder 'I'm here, you're not alone'.

Family is fucked up and always will be, but now it's just you, organically you _I think we're alone now _and dad isn't here to tell you how to be, interact, to love and not love.

You're set adrift - literally, in space and time - no longer guided by that stern cruel old man.

You have to find your own way. 

Certainty number five: you have a lot to work out, together, when this is all over.


End file.
